February 21, 2003

This’ll be it for a while - after today’s entry, I will be traveling for the next week, so you will probably have to go elsewhere - I suggest Copyfight, bIPlog, The Shifted Librarian, Freedom to Tinker and others from the sidebar to the right. See you in a week

This is going to be interesting - CNet reports that PGR/The Honest Thief is planning to exploit a recent Dutch court ruling to become the preferred P2P filesharing operator.

Cool! I got an e-mail this morning offering me a press pass to attend the Berkeley DRM Conference next week. If I weren’t going to be out of the country, I’d certainly be tempted, because it looks like they’ve got a great program planned. Whether or not you’re going, the online resources are well worth a review!

Another shot across the bow - HP Canada wants to see the repeal of the digital media levy and is working to form the Canadian Coalition for Fair Digital Access to work toward this objective.

The ZDnet version of the story about the University of Wyoming’s efforts to track P2P includes TalkBacks - see the state of the discussion among the ZDNet readership.

The LATimes has some more detail on the lawsuit filed against Bertelsmann over their investment in Napster. The interesting thing about this suit is that it could easily be construed as reinforcing the effort to stifle all innovation by the record companies in this area - why take the risk in the face of this kind of litigation?

The LATimes also has an interesting spin on Berman’s comment from the Digital Rights Summit - that Hollywood is distancing themselves from Berman-Coble, so he probably won’t reintroduce it this session.

So here’s the $64 question - what idiot thought that this approach was actually going to keep this material off the P2P networks? "I know! — we’ll just release it on vinyl! We’ll go retro with - get this - pure analog! Those P2P pirates will never figure out how to rip an MP3 from that." Do you suppose s/he got paid to offer up that kind of lame advice? I mean, hasn’t the measure of the music aficionado always been the quality and extent of his playback tools? Of course someone will have a good AtoD setup to deal with vinyl. Sheesh!

“I’m here today to tell you that I’m scared. Silicon Valley is under threat,” said Joe Kraus, co-founder of Digitalconsumer.org. “The DMCA’s blatant restriction on circumvention threatens a few of the core foundations of Silicon Valley: interoperability, innovation without prior permission and Silicon Valley’s (belief in) empowering the consumer.

“Never in our history have fewer been in a position to control more of the creative potential of our society than now,” Lessig said. “We have to buy them off, so they don’t break the Internet in the interim.”

At a heated Digital Rights Summit at Intel Corp.’s headquarters, Lessig joined entrepreneurs and other academics in warning that Hollywood’s copy-protection demands could strike a lethal blow to the U.S. technology industry.

Punctuated by hisses, applause and shouts of “Amen!” from members of the 100-person crowd, the four-hour debate illustrated the gargantuan gap between Silicon Valley and Hollywood when it comes to so-called digital rights management.

Liberal Democrats are horrified by the legion of conservative talk show hosts who dominate the airwaves. But the problem stretches across party lines. National Journal reported last month that Representative Mark Foley, Republican of Florida, was finding it difficult to reach his constituents over the air since national radio companies moved into his district, reducing the number of local stations from five to one. Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, had a potential disaster in his district when a freight train carrying anhydrous ammonia derailed, releasing a deadly cloud over the city of Minot. When the emergency alert system failed, the police called the town radio stations, six of which are owned by the corporate giant Clear Channel. According to news accounts, no one answered the phone at the stations for more than an hour and a half. Three hundred people were hospitalized, some partially blinded by the ammonia. Pets and livestock were killed.

It can costs a label $250,000 just to get a new single played on rock radio. That doesn’t guarantee the song will become a hit. It just gains access to the airwaves. If the song actually does become a mainstream Top-40 hit, indie costs balloon to more than $1 million per song. When consumers complain about the price of an $18 CD, most have no idea how much money record companies spend trying to market those CDs to radio.

The problem for record companies today is that fewer consumers are spending $18 on CDs, or even $13. Thanks in large part to free downloading and file-sharing, CD sales have plummeted nearly 20 percent in just two years, and record companies don’t seem to have a clue how to stop the free-fall.

February 19, 2003

This LATimes article describes the current efforts of the copyright industries to track P2P usage.

Assuming Judge Bates’ ruling is upheld, copyright holders could soon be routinely obtaining names and phone numbers from ISPs to match the Internet addresses they cull from peer-to-peer networks. And for those people, at least, any illusions about the anonymity of file sharing will be dispelled for good.

The truth is that it’s never been altogether clear who “owns” a film performance, and the issue has become even less clear as cinematic production techniques become more and more advanced. Onstage, lighting, makeup and costuming affect performances, but the actor ultimately retains control over how he or she is presented to the audience. In film, this has never been the case: Long after the actor has left the set, directors and producers make decisions that determine what audiences will and will not see, and how they will see it. The question becomes one of where to draw the line: Does the application of a “virtual prosthetic” represent a more significant alteration of an actor’s performance than a director accomplishes through editing?

As digital effects become increasingly prevalent in cinema, this question of performance ownership will become impossible to ignore, and audiences will be forced to decide whether it is the performer or the performance that is worth evaluating.

Q: Very nice. I didn’t know you were familiar with the Warner Brothers characters.

A: Poor bastards. They’re gonna be locked up even longer than I am. I guess if Chuck Jones were still around to direct their cartoons, they might not mind it on their plantation. Instead, they have to do those stupid commercials with Michael Jordan.

Anyway. Yeah, Walt Disney created me, but he didn’t create me out of nothing. Look at my skin. Look at my face. Look at this glove. I’m straight out of the minstrel show traditionï¿½which makes this whole “ownership” business stick in my craw even more.

I’m also Buster Keaton.

Q: Sorry?

A: My first cartoon short, Steamboat Willie, was a direct parody of Keaton’s movie Steamboat Bill, Jr. On the very first page of the script, it says, “Orchestra starts playing opening verses of Steamboat Bill.” I remember what Eldred’s lawyer Lawrence Lessig said when he read that: “Try doing a cartoon take-off of one of Disney, Inc.’s latest films with an opening that copies the music.”

So yeah, they created me. But they don’t want to let other people build on me when they make their own creations, the way they did when I was born. And now I’m locked up for another stinking 20 years! Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to greet kids at Disneyland every single day, always smiling, never slipping off for a cigarette?

But the president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Cameron Murphy, said the industry was wrong to target students.

“The focus of these organisations should be on people who are running or pirating music for clear commercial benefit,” he said. “I don’t think there is any benefit to the community in prosecuting individuals who do this as a one-off. I mean, we’d have half the students in Australia in jail.”

But not everyone is pleased with the growing popularity of multi-region DVD machines. While it is not illegal to sell such machines in North America, the major studios are not happy about the potential lost revenue. To try and dampen their growing popularity, the studios have been coming up with several ways to make watching movies on these players much more difficult. Recently, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) developed the Regional Code Enhancing (RCE) system that is now being placed on many Region 1 DVDs. The RCE is made to prevent Region 1 DVDs from being played on multi-region DVD players, and there are talks underway to include this technology on DVDs released around the world. Still, many multi-region DVD players are now starting to be released with technology that gets around the RCE system.

Still, it seems irresponsible for music-industry officials to present these sales statistics as proof that piracy is overwhelmingly responsible for the industry’s woes while conveniently ignoring the economic and technological context that puts those numbers in perspective. “The policy decisions being made today are based on the assumption that [file trading] is killing the music business. But no one is looking deeply enough at the facts,” says Jim Burger, an attorney who represents the computer industry at Washington (D.C.) law firm Dow, Lohnes & Albertson.

Acacia Technologies is going to court to protect their streaming patent.

Slashdot has finally posted a discussion on the prosecution of satellite TV hackers, some of whom are being charged with DMCA violations. As I mentioned when this first came out, the Department of Justice now has found a defendant whose general alleged venality gets them out of the problems they had with ElcomSoft and Sklyarov. There are some interesting and some naive posts, but the most interesting issues relate to questions of the legality of interpreting information broadcast on the public airwaves and, more importantly IMHO, do you really need the DMCA to prosecute this sort of crime? Some posters say, “I am generally opposed to the DMCA, but this is the sort of crime it was designed to penalize” - but was the DMCA the only reason these defendents were prosecuted? I think not, but will a defense attorney find this a useful question at trial? During appeal?

Another article telling us just how much was "lost" to IP infringement, based on someone’s report. A look at the methodology (a scant 5 pages) employed shows that nothing particularly new has been done to consider how to estimate these "losses" - not to mention the benefits through network effects, promotion, etc.

David Stutz is leaving Microsoft, and he’s written a going-away letter that discusses what the company needs to do in the face of the transition from the PC to the network - and the open source elements of that effort. An interesting read, closing with good advice for almost everyone: "Stop looking over your shoulder and invent something!

With some constitutional provisions, we tinker at our peril. Fortunately, the Copyright Clause is not one of them.

The Framers did not debate the Copyright Clause. It was introduced; it passed. That was it. Compare that to the hours and hours of debate spent on shaping the Congress and the presidency. The Copyright Clause is not the kind of well-considered provision that we should hesitate to amend.

Moreover, if they were alive today, the Framers might well have supported an amendment to the Copyright Clause. The very philosophy of the Constitution is to expect, oppose, and correct the inevitable abuses of power. And over the years, the Copyright Clause has become a flashpoint for just such abuse. While it is corporate, not government, power that is being abused, it is an abuse of a power granted under the Constitution nonetheless.

“When your employees put music, movies, videogames or other software on your computer systems without a license or other permission from the copyright owner, it is not ’sharing’ or ‘fair use.’ It is theft,” the brochure reads. “When these works are made available to others in your organization, or to the public over the Internet, it is no different than running an illegal distribution business.”

The brochure exhorts companies to audit their own networks for pirated material, delete any copyrighted works found, and designate a copyright-compliance officer.

It also turns the spotlight on the drain on corporate resources and on the security problems raised by employees trading copyrighted files. Corporate security companies say these concerns in particular have been resonating among businesses in recent months.

They’re all dramatic, and they all go against everything the labels have tried lately, but a quick look at a graph of CD sales quarter-by-quarter (think Grand Canyon) suggests that only bold moves will save the industry from an otherwise inexorable slide. What to do?

Some interesting questions raised about why Lexis and Nexis won’t sell their online services to public libraries. Slashdot discussion. How to reconcile what these publishers do for profit and what governments/courts require of citizen’s to understand about the law? What does access mean? An interesting thing to think about in this context, and a provocative article whether you agree with the conclusions or not.

Seventeen defendants were indicted in all, but only six were charged under the criminal antidecryption provisions of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The 11 others were charged with breaking federal laws against conspiracy and manufacturing devices for the purpose of stealing satellite signals. The DMCA-related charges were unsealed Tuesday and marked only the second time a grand jury has issued indictments involving the act.

Wow! I’ve already gotten some comments on my late-night posting. I have at least one point that I need to make more clear: speaking as an MIT alum at both the undergrad and graduate level, I would never assert that life at MIT is all about grades. You can’t really survive here if you don’t want to learn anyway.

But grades are embedded into the institution; the faculty have to generate them, the students expect them and the university employs them as indicators of performance, health and progress - students AND faculty (we get graded, too, via course evaluations). At MIT, at least in my day (I never thought I’d use that expression seriously <G>), it was vital that you understood grades, because survival in classes required gaming the system - you might also want to learn the material for yourself, but you definitely had to figure out what was going to be on the exam if you expected to survive.

There’s even a book on the subject (no, not the Paper Chase, although there’s a particular resonance given the locus of Dave’s efforts) - The Hidden Curriculum by Benson Snyder. It’s old, perhaps, but it was a revelation to me as an undergraduate. Written by someone intimately familiar with both the MIT and the Wellesley educational experience, it contrasts the two to develop several important themes, one of which is that courses operate at two levels - the overt curriculum, which is embedded in the readings, syllabi, etc; and the hidden curriculum, which are the specific tasks that must be achieved in order to pass the class.

What gives the hidden curriculum traction is that grades are awarded, and are considered by a host of individuals and institutions. And the knowledge of that leads to a certain conception of competitive behavior that both sides of the process exploit. Derek pointed out that weblogs might be a great way for students to turn in their weekly papers - true, but what about the last student to post his/her paper - is it fair to assess that paper on the same basis as the others, knowing that this student had the opportunity to learn from everyone else’s earlier posting? If not, how would you revise the assessment process - looking at timestamps? Would you really believe them?

Now, there are mechanics that can be used to work that problem, but that’s just the first one that comes to mind, and it explicitly identifies the key problem - grades make us work competitively, while weblogs make us collaborative. Shoehorning the two together in the face of institutional pressures to develop grades (and to make them mean something - for admissions, hiring, etc.) is going to be an uphill battle.

Which is not to say that it shouldn’t be tried - but it’s going to be interesting to see how this very real clash of cultures is going to be worked through. The opportunities are great - but some anticipatory strategic and organizational thinking will probably help everyone out a lot.

February 11, 2003

Found myself ruminating a bit on some of the thoughts raised at the Winer/Berkman Center weblogs discussion. In particular, I think that Dave’s going to have an interesting time learning about the dynamics of the academic environment. He comes to the weblog experiment with the clear hope that widespread dissemination of weblogs will better college education - that’s a strong assumption and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out - and what it might take to bring it to fruition.

A particular angle of that experiment is going to be how well the current education model will accommodate a transition from an essentially competition-based process to a cooperative process. Consider that, particularly at the undergraduate level, competition for grades is a key motivator that structures much of the way in which classes are conducted, material is presented and learning is motivated. (Yes, I know there are exceptions to this model, but it’s not the norm at Harvard, or MIT). Once you get to graduate school, the process frequently changes - when students are taking classes they love, for reasons that they understand, the whole motivation for learning turns into something amazing, and I can readily see how the construction of an open, collaborative framework for sharing learning can work. Heck, when I was a graduate student, I learned an incredible amount from my graduate student colleagues - while at the same time realizing that I was going to reduce my course load by at least a third (compared to my undergraduate days) because there suddenly wasn’t enough time to really dig into the topics being presented.

But, at the undergraduate level, there are a lot more hoops to be jumped through, and the content of many courses is governed by factors outside the university - certification programs and the traditions of the disciplines themselves. (For example, is there a single differential equations course that *doesn’t* include the snowplow problem? And can you really say you have an engineering education if you haven’t had to solve it - at least once?) It may be very difficult to accommodate cooperative learning in such classes without the kind of wholesale revision of curricula that many universities are loath to revisit - until they’re forced to do so. So, there will probably be the need for a certain momentum to develop first - and after seeing Dave in person, I can easily believe that he’s the guy who can make a good stab at it.

But, I think that the real opportunity at the undergraduate level - the place where it has natural traction - is not necessarily in the classroom, as a part of a course. Rather, it is the way that the weblog can help to foster the digital equivalent of the late-night dorm bullsh*t sessions where much of the true benefit of the college experience comes - campus-wide! Testing your notions of good and bad, right and wrong, fair and unfair - all those things that made college the exciting experience that helped you to realize that you could make choices, challenge beliefs and test assumptions without too much fear of the consequences - and making some surprisingly strong friendships along the way. I certainly see how weblogs can further that process, and lead to a host of new learning - whether or not it ever migrates back into the undergraduate curriculum.

As I said, it’s going to be interesting to see how the experiment goes….

Cory Doctorow announces the return of MusicBrainz. It sounds like the kind of application that everyone downloading digital music will be wanting to use; should be interesting to see what comes of it.

The first version of MusicBrainz, which nears completion during the first quarter of 2003, focuses on creating an open database of basic music metadata which can be used for identifying audio CDs and digital audio tracks (MP3, Ogg/Vorbis , WAV, etc.). MusicBrainz is comprised of three separate components which all work together to enable users to semi-automatically identify music and apply clean metadata tags to their music collection….

A new data point to add to the considerations of the economics of publishing: publishing public domain books seems to be profitable if not lucrative - at least according to this NYTimes article. With a telling postscript:

“The first thing you’d do in classics publishing was keep a list — a rolling schedule of what was going into the public domain,” Mr. Ebershoff said. “That was item No. 1. Now it’s not only not item No. 1; it’s not an item.”

MSNBC has a Reuters story on the recording industry’s efforts to track online distribution - the Global Release Identifier (GRiD) (via the IFPI www site). The FAQ says what it is, a new code for identifying music in digital content, but the applications are a little cloudy. The Slashdot discussion tries to make sense (or an issue) out of this, but it looks more like another way to track inventory or distribution than any sort of way to combat piracy. OTOH, if we get a distribution network that works only in the presence of this datastream, then it becomes possible to track who’s listening to what, how often, etc. But that’s a LONG ways off at this point. Two talks that offer up some further insight are here and here

(and, when I have more time, I need to revisit Rights.com, a firm that seems to consult in these topics.)

February 10, 2003

Got an e-mail from Hylton, who’s removed a bit of fugitive code from the Corante weblog, apparently based upon my whining yesterday - thanks!!

Since that worked, maybe I should also ask the same question about Jenny Levine’s Shifted Librarian, which also displays this now defunct Corante behavior. It would be nice to see it go, particularly since she has a fun post today on Valenti and a possible library chair of the future.

Jack Balkin continues his speculation on the parallels between the “free culture” movement (with goals pursued via Eldred) and the gay rights movement whose goals were also pursued via Constitutional challenges. I can’t give you a link - something’s wrong at his end - but you can start at the current weblog and backtrack to the Feb 8 posting.(Update - Jack points out that eventually Blogger gets its ducks in a row and, sure enough, the entry has a working link now!)

More importantly, Prof Balkin offers up a response to Larry’s original late night questionings in the wake of the Eldred decision (he updates them here in a less bleak form). Balkin’s argument is that, like it or not, Larry’s legal strategy failed because:

[i]t did not sufficiently recognize that what lies behind constitutional law is constitutional politics. Conservative jurists on the Supreme Court offer arguments for limited federal power for largely symbolic and ideological reasons that are connected to the goals of the conservative social movements of the 1970’s and 1980’s. That is why those judges and Justices were put on the federal bench in the first place. Arguments for limited federal power allowed the conservative justices to strike down or limit the reach of federal laws– particularly federal civil rights laws– that they and other conservatives don’t particularly like. The argument for limited federal power also allowed the conservative Justices to strike a symbolic blow for state’s rights.

The Copyright Term Extension Act does not fit into these categories. It does not symbolically trench upon interests of the states, and it is not a liberal civil rights measure. It was generally understood, for better or worse, as a protection of property rights, and many conservatives tend to think that protecting property rights is a good thing.

(Off topic) Tom Tomorrow has posted a transcript of a recent O’Reilly Factor program, during which an invited guest, the son of a 9/11 victim, disagrees with Mr. O’Reilly’s position. Stunning, yet not terribly surprising.

Salon has a lengthy article on the peculiar position of AOL/Time-Warner inthe P2P music issue - which side of the battle will they choose. With some interesting speculation on why Verizon rather than AOL was targeted for the first subpoena to get the name of a Kazaa-using subscriber. Then there’s this:

“The ISPs get thousands of these things, and they get a not insignificant percent that are not just wrong but are spectacularly wrong,” says Cohn of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “And if the Verizon decision under 512h is upheld, we’ll start seeing the same thing for people’s identities, and they’re going to be wrong in the same percentage that they’re wrong now.” That’s because a key problem with the DMCA, critics of the law say, is that it provides little incentive for copyright owners to make sure that they’re providing the court with accurate claims. “They may as well make these things as broad as possible,” Cohn says. “There’s nothing in the system to make them do otherwise. It’s just takedown, takedown, takedown.”

Critics of the Bates ruling also worry about intentionally fraudulent copyright claims making it through the system. If you have an entire legal apparatus devoted to “expeditiously” divulging people’s private information, there’s a chance that the system will become a target of people with something much more sinister than copyright enforcement in mind. “We have seen copyright laws abused by people who have other agendas,” Cohn says. “This is a method by which an angry ex-husband can locate an ex-wife, or a process by which stalkers can locate people.”

February 9, 2003

Sarah Lai Strickland’s new weblog (what *is* it, by the way, with the "rateyourmusic.com" link in all these Corante weblogs that makes them so agonizingly slow to come up from time to time?!?!) is an excuse to look at an earlier piece of hers from the Seattle Times on the problems of the public domain - how to value it, what to do with it and just how difficult it is to discuss it in the face of ubiquitous copyright. The idea that something might be valuable without being owned remains troubling to many.

Cory Doctorow points to an article in The Guardian that shows what is happening when broadband provides are viewed as moving too slowly to connect parts of rural England - WiFi rollout by communities unwilling to put up with being treated like second-class citizens.

Most deserve oblivion. They’re trite sentiments set to generic music. Yet precisely because song-poem hacks will sing absolutely anything, among the tens of thousands of song-poems recorded every year are a few so improbable, so skewed, so far beyond the imagination of more professional songwriters that they have a fractured charm all their own:

Matthew Oppenheim, a senior vice president at the RIAA , said in a conference call Friday that Verizon was exaggerating the privacy risks of complying with requests made under the DMCA. Verizon and its allies, including a former Clinton administration privacy official, have suggested that copyright holders should file a “John Doe” lawsuit to unmask suspected peer-to-peer infringers instead of wielding DMCA subpoenas.

THE RECORDING Industry Association of America does not want to suggest that it will be suing millions of computer users for sharing music files over the Internet. But its power to have them subpoenaed, affirmed by a federal judge last month, raises grave privacy concerns and ought to be appealed, as Verizon Communications intends to do. The industry has a point that most file sharers are violating copyright law, costing it substantial business. The advent of file sharing has radically transformed the music business, however, and the industry cannot rely on legal action to quash technological advances.

…Instead of forcing Internet service providers to reveal the names of file sharers, the industry ought to work with them to turn copyright violators into paying customers.

February 7, 2003

Jack Balkin speculates on the parallels between Eldred and other issues taken to the Supreme Court to achieve major cultural shifts in advance of groundswell support - he parallels free culture with the gay rights movement. An interesting read.

Law.com reports on the Lexmark and Chamberlain DMCA cases. Ed Felten and Jessica Litman are quoted on the implications of these interpretations of the DMCA strictures on technological innovation and hardware compatibility. UPDATE: Ed Felten reports that Static Control has applied for a DMCA exception in their case.

I always brace myself before checking out the site, but today there’s a TCS opinion piece that I agree with - Sonia Arrison on the Verizon decision as a threat to privacy by overbroad copyright enforcement mechanisms.

“Under current standard industry practices, Sony Music has been handsomely rewarded financially during this period while the members of Incubus have received very little compensation from their creative and professional efforts,” Rennie said. The core question, he added, is whether Incubus “is entitled to share fairly in the fruits of their labor going forward.”

A fun article in the NYTimes on using a GameBoy Advance to play MP3s - the SongPro. A look at invention, corporate IP protection and music. And, again, something from Larry Lessig’s arguments about innovation and threats - youth and the power of open standards.

When legislators make foolish laws, or courts enforce laws foolishly, they teach people to justify doing whatever they want. In particular, when teen-agers spend their formative years acquiring contempt for laws that are made by the ignorant at the behest of the selfish, I fear for the consequences when those young people become our next generation of leaders.

That’s why the battle between the record industry and the rest of the world is more than just an example of a business that doesn’t understand its reason for being. And it’s also why we should wish Verizon well in its appeal of last month’s District Court ruling, which ordered that service provider to identify a user who may have engaged in file swapping.

…As I noted late last month when discussing this issue with CBS News, Bach didn’t need a record contract—or royalties—to inspire him. He had a family to feed. The present-day business model of the record companies is a temporary artifact of a transitional stage in a developing technology.

February 5, 2003

Siva Viadhyanathan has a discussion with a musician friend of his from Wonderlick on the future of music at his weblog for today. (Note: The actual URL for the entry is being served up incorrectly as his server as "text/plain" so I can’t really point you there without giving you the working weblog URL and a date reference. It looks like a Blogger configuration error, but I don’t know how to solve it.)

Findlaw has an editorial arguing that the Eldred decision has implications for other equally contentious pieces of legislation - focusing on gun control.

The LATimes has a legislative review piece arguing that there will not be any action on copyright-related legislation this term, due to other more pressing concerns - oh, except for possibly something on the broadcast flag!

I am reminded (after a look for the link to the draft material from Terry Fisher’s book for a student), that I was going to kick in some thoughts. Having read it through, I am (once again) left slackjawed at how he frames the discussion with his deconstruction of the response of his Brazilian audience to his question about P2P activity. However, I have been remiss in my homework, so I have not yet put my thoughts down - yet. But I will, Donna - soon, I hope!

The Internet means exposure, and these days, unless you’re in the Top 40, you’re not getting on the radio. The Internet is the only outlet for many artists to be heard by an audience bigger than whoever shows up at a local coffeehouse. The Internet allows people like me to gain new fans; if only 10% of those downloading my music buy my records or come to my shows, I’ve just gained enough fans to fill Carnegie Hall twice over.

Not sure how long it’ll be a free service, but check out BigChampagne which seems to chart song swapping on P2P networks in a fashion directly akin to the BillBoard charts. How they are related to slyck.com, which seems to track network usage, is not clear.

Broadcasters and their program suppliers have had almost total control over how we view their products since the dawn of TV. The real magic with TiVo and other PVRs isn’t the ability to skip commercials, but rather the unprecedented opportunity to wrest nearly absolute control over the time and manner in which programs will be viewed. Skipping or deleting commercials is but a cherry on the sundae.

This level of consumer control is so new to users that it’s proven enormously difficult for the manufacturers of these systems to effectively market PVRs. Promoting these systems as digital VCRs is like describing a modern automobile as a horse and buggy without a horse — accurate, but utterly insufficient.

A complete change in viewing behavior is implicit in the use of PVRs. That difference is especially scary to broadcasters, advertisers and those who have built their careers and livelihoods on maintaining the status quo.